More or less concurrent, yet
separate from each other, three aspects of the historical character of the concept
of nature seem, at present, to manifest themselves anew: the idea of the objective
historical character of nature, implied by current theoretical approaches
of physics and biology; the dawning recognition of the historical character
of scientific knowledge of nature, accompanying the breakdown of the
static, ahistorical conception of science; and the experience of the historical
character of the appropriation of nature by social human beings, of their
relationship to nature, an experience imposed by the effects of the scientific‑technological
revolution and by the pressure of the ecological problems. In their totality,
the three aspects bestow upon the historical character of the concept of nature
its specific philosophical relevance, which is conditioned not only
and not, in the first instance,by the status of the knowledge
of nature, but also and above all by ideationally mediated
social tendencies.

Major themes which dominated
the philosophical controversies in the 1970s and 1990s on the historical character
of the concept of nature, were reformulated from previous ones, [1]
and called into question the "received view" of scientific theory
by means of the historicizing interpretation of scientific revolutions (Kuhn
1962), the phrase "human history of nature." [2]
Still, they did not become the focus of philosophical reflections and debates
until later, when more intensely developed questioning about the historical
character of the knowledge of nature and about the nature of the knowledge of
history became intertwined with the "realism controversy," when determination
of the historical character of science and technology was set apart, in fierce
controversies, from theses regarding their congenital uncertainty and tendency
toward crises, and when, moreover, the problem of the historical relationship
to natureand, [end of p. 129] thereby, also the problem of history
itselfbecame salient. [3] All of this,
in turn, was exposed to the attractiveness of the alternative, and of the complementarity,
presented by positivist scientism, and life philosophy's critique of science.

Nevertheless, the connection
of the three aspects of the historical character of the concept of nature remains,
on that account, latent or is reflected only fragmentarily (although their relevance
is due to that connection), because behind the three aspects lie differing motives,
and those aspects do not come to light in a continuous conceptual field. The
idea of the objective historical character of nature arises and is reproduced
in areas of contact between scientific theories and philosophy; in doing so,
these areas of contact are located not in the peripheral regions of both, but
instead in the basic subject matter of those theories and in their philosophical
reflection or, rather, in the categorical resources of philosophical theory.
Historical consciousness of the scientific knowledge of nature is manifested
in the medium of the history of science and the theory of knowledge, in the
often intricate texture of philosophical interpretations and presuppositions
of scientific knowledge. The present configuration of the social relationship
to nature and its historical character, or historicity, are represented in the
reports of the results of critical economic‑ecological studies and/or
in panoramic depictions of historico‑philosophical myths of crisis.

2

If the appearance of insubstantiality
and ambiguity adheres to the idea of the historicity of the concept of nature,
this is so, first of all, insofar as the philosophical concept of nature and
the category of historicitywhich intersect in that ideaare resistant
to the idea of the historicity of the concept of nature, are themselves incongruent
and carry over their incongruence to the historicity of the concept of nature.
This formulation is, to such an extent, foreign to the traditional and fixed
neopositivist conception of science, that "history as challenge" (Ströker
1974, 27ff) must, at first, impose itself upon the philosophical understanding
contained in "analytical," ahistorical custom. The concept of the
reality of nature had fallen a victim to neopositivism's distrust of metaphysics;
if it was perhaps allowed, it was only as an empirical correlate of physics,
as with Schlick (1948, 27ff). As a result of his interpretation, the history
of psychical subjectivity was given up. Parallel to the loss of the concept
of objective historicity, the possibility of a historicity of concepts also
vanished. Inasmuch as logical positivism accepted the doctrines of the early
Wittgenstein (or, rather, the early Wittgenstein the ideas of Russell's positivist
period)"the [end of p. 130] facts in logical space are the
world; the world divides into facts" (Wittgenstein 1969, 11)the "world"
and the "facts," the concepts and propositions expressed in discursive
thinking, were simply located in the domain of unchangeable identity, of ahistoricity.
The historicity of the concept of nature was subject to positivist prohibition:
it not only was left out of consideration in the most comprehensive construction
of logical empiricismCarnap's work, The Logical Structure of the World
[4]it was also lost in Popper's falsificationism,
which broke with earlier forms of positivism and appealed to the history of
knowledge. [5]

History and historicity, accordingly,
can find refuge only in mysteries and myths which are conceptually and scientifically
inaccessible and in experiences which are rationally incomprehensible. Thus,
there took shape that dichotomy of the categories of nature and history, which
was conceptualized in the approach of Droysen, then prevailed as a principle
in neo‑Kantian epistemology and in viewpoint of life philosophy from Dilthey
and Yorck von Wartenburg to Croce and Collingwood, Heidegger and the "hermeneutic
philosophy." It is likewise a feature of positivism, as its tacit premise
or unexpressed conclusion; but it becomes clearly evident in historicist versions
of positivism, especially where it inclines toward life philosophy's critique
of scientific realism, toward an epistemological apology for the ahistorical,
universal value of mythical accounts.

The actual historicity of the
concept of nature can no more be situated in life philosophy's conception of
historicity than in the ahistoricism of positivism. Following this tradition
of historicism and radicalizing it, Heidegger's Being and Time attached
the historical to Dasein, to existentially construed individual subjectivity
(Heidegger 1972, 372ff) [6] Heidegger's late
philosophy also upheld the thesis that "Only the ek‑sistent human
being is historical. 'Nature' has no history" (Heidegger 1967, 85). [7]
The idea of the "historicity of Being" did not nullify the disjunction
between the concept of nature and historicity; rather, it brought it to the
most extreme point. Already in the conception of the historicity of Dasein,
historicity was divorced from real history; in the concept of the "historicity
of Being," the separation became a profound rupture. If there is "Being"
outside of "being," the "historicity of Being" is completely
split off from events in nature and society, [8]
to be suspended then in the twilight of attachment to "Being" and
of the decision on truth. [9] Indeed, Heidegger's
idea of the "historicity of Being" abandoned contact with actual history
and the history of knowledge, while, from time to time, it [end of p. 131]
also drew into its sphere of influence efforts that worked toward historicizing
the concept of nature. Through the centrality of the concept of historicity
in Heidegger's philosophy and through the iridescent ambiguity of this concept
in the relations between "being‑there," "Being," and
"the happening of truth," the fact that this concept dispensed with
history was obscured. [10] For one thing,
the relativizing, historicist critique of modem and present‑day natural
sciencewhich considers the latter's claim to objectivity as an indication
of subjectivist philosophy, a technological attitude, and the "oblivion
of Being"for another, the conjuring up of the romantically interpreted
"naturalness of nature" (Heidegger 1983, 144ff), ascribed to a prescientific,
immediate perception, together strengthen the impression that Heidegger's philosophy
offers the categorical possibility for understanding the historicity of nature
and knowledge.

If the concept of nature is
subsumed under the conception of historicity molded by life philosophy, it is
subjectivized by that conception: the concept of nature pays for this
historicizing with the severance of its relationship to objectively real
nature. Collingwood, orienting himself above all on Croce's historicism
and without knowing and accepting the radicalism of Heidegger's "philosophy
of Being," diametrically excluded nature from the concept of history
and, in conjunction with the temporal events of nature, the processes of the
biological existence of human beings, as well. [11]
He equated history with those thought processes of the past, which were devoid
of all law‑governed connections and which the soul of the historian experienced.
The concept of nature isintegrated into this category of history;
as a result, "nature depends for its existence on something else;"
"natural science is a form of thought that depends for its existence upon
another form of thought" (Collingwood 1965, 176). This conception exhibited
the factor which the ahistoricism of positivism left out of account: observation
of nature and scientific theories are "historical facts," the understanding
of which, according to Collingwood, admits of neither a history of nature (which,
in his view, cannot exist) nor a material history of society (which likewise
is denied). "Natural science as a form of thought exists and always existed
in the context of history, and it depends on historical thinking for its existence.
From this I venture to draw the conclusion that one can never understand natural
science unless one understands history, and that one cannot answer the question
what nature is unless one knows what history is" (Collingwood 1965, 177).
Life philosophy's point of view, today shaped more by Nietzsche and Heidegger
than by Croce, provides, of course, its interpretation of the [end of p.
132] historicity of the concept of naturenowadays that interpretation
is even attractive to some versions of the positivist understanding of sciencehowever,
it reaffirms, in the final analysis, the dichotomy, essential to it, between
historicity and the concept of nature. Confronted with current trends and problems
in the historicizing of the concept of nature, Gouhier, from the perspective
of a religious‑existentialist life philosophy, sees "the crisis of
the concept of nature" springing up. He transposes historical developments
in the social appropriation of nature, ecological pressures and dangers,
into an abstractly anthropological sphere, in which Christian conceptions,
interpreted along the lines of life philosophy, are at home: that of reason
distorted by hubris and beckoning into the abyss"the understanding
has brought homo faber to this paradoxical state of affairs: the point
in time comes when human beings have to defend nature against human beings"and
that of evil incarnated in nature"there even has come the point in
time when human beings ask themselves whether there is not a principle of evil
in it" (Gouhier 1975, 6ff). As the final word, there remained the traditional,
absolute separation, and opposition between real historicity and the concept
of nature of the sciences, by means of which the understanding "eliminates
everything that was historical in the events of nature and transforms nature
into a world of concepts and laws" (Gouhier 1975, 9ff). [12]
Real historicity is characteristic merely of existing human individuality, whose
irrational, imaginative action transcends nature and the scientific knowledge
of nature.

3

When the historicity of the
concept of nature, in particular that of the relationship of human beings to
nature, is discussed, the fires of life philosophy's critique of civilization
and science, inspired by Nietzsche and Spengler, Klages, and Ernst Jünger
leap upward; on the other hand, however, a suppressed stock of ideas also penetrates
into philosophical consciousness. An indication of this is that, for example,
in Ernst Oldemeyer's "Outline of a Typology of the Human Relationship to
Nature"for which Marxist ideas hardly form a basis; dialectical materialism
(including the "application of dialectical thinking to the processes of
nature" in Engels and Lenin) is ranked among the approaches which understand
"nature as an open, comprehensive total system," among the conceptions
where tendencies are noticeable which "reach beyond a counterconceptual
demarcation, a mechanistic objectivism, and a transcendental conception of nature
as the not‑I [Nicht‑Ich‑Auffassung]" (Oldermeyer 1983,
35ff). There emerges the need [end of p. 133] and the necessity for a
philosophical concept of nature, which is neither inclined to project a picture
of nature standing opposed to, or replacing, the natural sciences, nor endeavors
to delineate either a synopsis of scientific theories or a more abstractly rendered
compendium of them, but, indeed, nurtures itself on them and, in turn, influences
them, while preserving, however, its sui generis content in the correlation
of philosophical problems and categories.

This concept of nature reflects
the state of, and the historical change in, the scientific knowledge of nature
and, at the same time, the social‑practical interchange with nature, its
conditions and consequences, the genetic and structural relations of the history
of nature and of the social history of human beings. The philosophical concept
of nature, which comprises the material historicity of nature and the historicity
of the material and spiritual relationship of social human beings to nature,
presupposes a history which is not contrary in conception to that of law, as,
likewise, the recognition of the historicity of real objects and of knowledge
does not stand in a disjunctive relation to theoretical knowledge. This category
of history is not limited to the history of human beings: if it construes the
history of human beings in its particular objectivity, it should neither naturalize
human history nor anthropomorphize nature, in order not only to include the
idea of the laws of human history but also to reflect the historicity of nature.
"Precisely as in mathematics, the structures implicitly contained in fundamental
physical laws are incomparably much richer than what is explicitly expressed
in the formulation of the fundamental laws" (Treder 1974, 2). This probably
holds true even more for philosophical laws and categories; the concepts of
nature and history condense elements of other categories, of special scientific
knowledge and of practical‑spiritual experiences.

4

The objectively real aspect
of the historicity of the concept of nature becomes evident after the development
of the Darwinian revolution, of the synthesis of the theory of evolution with
genetics in the fundamental domains, as well, of physics. The course of development
of the idea of historicity is, in a sense, an inversion of material
historicity. In the historical epoch of scientific knowledge since the seventeenth
century, that idea evolved, in the first place, in the consideration of social
human beings (Kroeber 1960, 5ff), thenafter the idea of historicity
penetrates into geologyin comprehension of the world of living organisms;
it manifests itself, [end of p. 134] lastly, in the knowledge of physical
reality. The biological conception of development presupposed, nevertheless,
a definite historicizing of the picture of nature (Bowler 1984, 4ff). As early
as the middle of the eighteenth century, Kant's cosmogonic hypothesis anticipated
the idea of the historicity of nature, and the history of science records approaches
to historicizing the knowledge of naturenot only in biologyaround
the turn of the eighteenth century (Baron and Sticker 1963). In the nineteenth
century, at the time when the physics shaped by Newton was being consummated,
the time of the comprehensive extension and realization of the mechanistic interpretation,
the idea of the physical historicity of nature developed, in the first case,
in thermodynamics, while it presaged the transcending of that same mechanical
point of view. Boltzmann's physical ideas and philosophical reflectionsfrom
the standpoint of a historically minded, scientific materialism and in disagreement
with the positivism of that timesuggested far‑reaching associations
of that idea of historicity in connection with the new significance and the
transformation of the philosophical categories functioning immanently in physical
knowledge. [13] In Boltzmann's thought,
the idea of objective historicity implied by thermodynamic view was interlocked
with consciousness of the historicity of scientific knowledge of nature, among
other things, with the all‑important question about the relationship of
this historicity to the structure of physical theories, or with a historical,
nonapriori consideration of the logical laws of thought.

A domain in which, at present,
the idea of the objective historicity of nature finds expression is that of
irreversible thermodynamics based upon quantum theory, which thus implies more
radical changes than those of which Boltzmann could have had some notion. In
the opinion of Prigogine, this irreversible thermodynamics represents a novelty
even in relation to the concept of time in quantum theory. A consequence of
the principle of irreversibility, which engenders a change in the physical picture
of nature (the appearance of a new solution to equations with a critical value
in the physics of irreversible processes), "introduces history, as it were,
into physics" (Prigogine 1979, 118; Prigogine and Stengers 1981, 285ff).
Prigogine's conception does not restrict the idea of the historicity of naturewhich
he links with the concept of "oriented internal time"to thermodynamics;
the two revolutionary renovations of physics in the twentieth century. quantum
theory and relativity theory, also arrive at the same idea. [14]
Cosmology is the other place where the idea of the objective historicity of
nature prevails. The general theory of relativity, [end of p. 135] affirms
the historicity of physical systems, [15]
and therefore "the general properties of matter are endowed with historicity"
(Treder 1974, 61). This idea of historicity involves new problems regarding
physical knowledge, including the problem of the relationship between historicity
and the universal validity of fundamental laws of nature (Treder 1974, 59ff)
or fundamental constants (Dirac 1973). The same trend becomes apparent, likewise,
in attempts (leading, at times, into philosophical embarrassment) to rethink
the concept of time (Fraser 1982), in efforts to rediscover and refashion the
relational conception of time, in endeavoring to temporalize formal logic (Weizsäsker
1981, l7ff).

In their description of the
historicizing of knowledge, "of the discovery of time," Stephen Toulmin
and June Goodfield, in the middle 1960s, drew the conclusion that the "eternal
stability" of physical laws becomes problematic. It is supposed to be a
task of investigation to discern the historical possibility of modification
of natural laws and constants or their possible historical modifications, and
therefore "we may find ourselves on the threshold of the greatest of all
scientific revolutions" (Toulmin and Goodfield 1965, 264ff). [16]
The comprehension of historically developing knowledgeand, through this,
of the historicity of the reality of nature and human societynecessarily
tended toward dialectics and occasionally approximated itamong other things,
with regard to the historicity of the laws of nature. That representation accepted,
to be sure, the method of reasoning of Heraclitus, but disregarded the history
and the theoretical outcome of dialectics. The misconstruing and rejecting of
this theoretical outcome resulted in a certain vagueness, indeed confusion,
in grasping the connection of continuity and its interruption. In considering
the historicity of the laws of nature, the problem of the laws of history receded.
A teleological propensity was imputed to materialist dialectics; thus, no attention
was paid to the fact that materialist dialectics, putatively focused teleologically,
overcame, by means of the formulation of objective laws of historical movement,
the teleological interpretation of human history and explained the inherent
teleological factor of human activityparticularly its basic form, labornonteleologically.

Guided by that dialectical‑materialist
way of thinking, Engels, more than a century ago, formulated the idea of the
historicity of the laws of nature: "Eternal laws of nature are more
and more transformed into historical ones . . . this theory [the point here
is "the general formulation of the theory of the transformation of energy"A.
G.] itself changes with its consistent extension to all natural phenomena in
a historical representation of the changes [end of p. 136] occurring
successively in a world‑system from its origin until its end, hence in
a history in which, at every stage, other laws, that is, other types of phenomena
of the same universal movement, predominate and, therefore, nothing remains
thoroughly universal butthe movement" (Marx and Engels 1962,
20:505ff). This insight, which was far in advance of the state of the natural
sciences of that time, followed from the new philosophical conception
of history, which Marx effectuated and elaborated in the discovery of the appropriate
method of political economy, especially that of bourgeois society. The concept
of historicity was able hereas was repeatedly the case in the historical
process of cognitionto anticipate the further course of natural science,
because, as a philosophical category, it did not represent a mere derivative
of scientific knowledge but moved in the context of a characteristic generalness,
in characteristic relations, yet not incorporated in them (its relationship
to the natural sciences formed part of these relations).

If thinking reflects the current
historicizing motives of the natural sciences, if it wrestles with the concept
of historicity, then it develops philosophical content or assimilates
it. The penetration of historicity into the concept of nature brings with it
the curtailment or the upsetting of assertions previously held to be immutable.
As at the beginning of the century, so today the possibility of an idealist
interpretation emerges, where the urgency of a philosophical theory of dialectics
makes itself known (Wheeler 1976; Wheeler 1980). (And if the issue concerns
the historicity of nature in physics, in particular in cosmology, then, in addition,
theology announces its claim to an anthropomorphic, creationist interpretation
and, thereby, to its scientific validation [Yourgrau and Breck 1977]). It is,
first of all, life philosophy which offers a formulation of historicity opposed
to materialist dialectics; and with natural scientists whose thinking reflects
the historicizing of the concept of nature, dialectical insights, and ideas
of a Heideggerian or Bergsonian provenance stand side by side and/or the two
are commingled. [17]

5

The idea of the objectively
real historicity of nature implies a certain historicizing of the cognition
of nature; [18] from the conscious
realization of the latter, however, there only follows, in any case, the idea
of the objectively real historicity of nature, when the historical transformation
of the knowledge of nature brings that idea into prominence. Yet, the pattern
of the objectively real historicity of nature is itself, in these cases, not
identical with the pattern of [end of p. 137] the history of the historicity
of the knowledge of nature. The history of cognition of nature is the process
of the reflection of nature existing in its historicity; but the same history
cannot be reduced to the history of nature or incorporated into the
biological history of nature. The cognition of nature is, nevertheless, to be
subsumed under a category of historicity common, in the last analysis, to nature.
If the idea of the real historicity of nature contains, concomitantly, the factor
of its knowledge, the specific problem of that historicity of knowledgethe
relationship of historicity and objectivity, the dialectics of truthrefers
to the real historicity of nature. The knowledge, which reflects the historicity
of the knowledge of nature, looks for the relation between laws and historicity,
for the historicizing of the laws of cognition and knowledge, as well as for
the laws of the history of knowledge. At the beginning of the nineteenth century,
Schelling seems to have formulated this idea in his Lectures on the Method
of Academic Study, through which he anticipated much later developments:

"To the movements of
the external world correspond, according to a necessary law, the more silent,
yet, on that account, no less fundamental metamorphoses which occur in the
spirit of man himself. To believe that spiritual changes, scientific revolutions,
the ideas which engender them, and works themselves in which a definite scientific
or artistic spirit has been expressed are without necessity and do not come
into being according to law but by chance, is the highest barbarism"
(Schelling 1856, 5:226).

The awareness of the historicity
of the knowledge of nature does not establish the abstract property of changeableness;
it leads to the idea of the law‑governed connections between real history,
the history of cognition and theoretical knowledge.

The knowledge of nature accompanies,
as an ingredient, the historical process of society, of its relationship
to nature, [19] whichitself a
texture of material and consciousness‑related factorsis neither
derivable from the historicity of nature nor reducible to the historicity of
the knowledge of nature. In the Marxist understanding of the "natural‑historical
processes" of society (Marx and Engels 1983, 14), the expression "natural‑historical
process" is more than a metaphor, less than an absolute definition. The
history of society continues the history of nature, being based upon the latter.
Its objectivity, together with the necessity immanent in it, is not "weaker"
than that of the history of nature; the totality of the movement of society
is no less nonteleological. According [end of p. 138] to Marx, the objective
process of society is a function of teleologically deployed actions, and the
social appropriation of nature in the labor process is, at the same time, the
production and reproduction of objective social relations, which are devoid
of any materiality of nature. Even the technological process of production,
in which human beings as socially evolved, natural beings interact with extra‑human
nature, cannot be reduced to events of nature. "Nature builds no machines,
no locomotives, railroads, electric telegraphs, self‑acting mules, etc.
They are products of human industry: natural material changed into agents of
human volition concerning nature or of its activity in nature" (Marx and
Engels 1981, 582).

6

Marx's philosophy and political
economy superseded the naturalism and historicism of classical bourgeois thought,
overcoming the dichotomy therein. The dependence of historical human beings
on nature and the historicity of nature, which Goethe insisted upon with the
entire strength of his artistic creation and theoretical thought, are, with
Marx, embodiedin a heightened manner [aufgehoben‑enthalten]and
extended within a new context of knowledge. "NatureWe are surrounded
and embraced by itunable to step out of it and unable to come more deeply
into it. Without invitation or warning, it takes us up into the cycles of its
dance and sweeps onward with us, until we are exhausted and fall from its arms"
(Goethe 1981, 12:10ff). Goethe's naturalism went far beyond the fiction of the
bon sauvage, of the primordial, natural human being. His historicized
naturalism and naturalized historicism probed the possibility of surmounting
the dualism of naturalism and historicism. The "Faust" theme suggested
elements of life and experiences in thought, which could not themselves be situated
within the framework of Goethe's historicized naturalism and which resulted
from the social entanglement of individual destinies, from social collisions,
and from correlations of actions, experiences, and ideas that, of course, did
not stand apart from dependence on nature, but were not generated by that dependence.

In his Economic‑Philosophical
Manuscripts, Marx grappled with classical bourgeois naturalism, especially
with that of Feuerbach, while making use, in part, of Feuerbach's conceptualization
in a still unfinished process of overcoming him. Marx and Engels also later
adhered to the idea that the history of human society is a continuation of the
history of nature. "The fact that the physical [end of p. 139] and
spiritual life of human beings is connected with nature has no other meaning
than that nature is connected with itself, for human beings are a part of nature"
(Marx 1974, 157). While his basic preoccupation was with understanding that
which is social, Marx put this sentence into a stated perspective rising above
the traditional naturalism: "Therefore, social character is the
general character of the entire movement: as society itself produces
human beings as human beings, so is it produced by them"
(Marx 1974, 186). Here began a movement of thought which grasped the dialectics
of dependence upon, and appropriation of, nature by social human beings, of
their continuing ties to nature, and of their social historicity, which, indeed,
rests upon nature but goes beyond it. Thus, this movement got to the root of,
and critically explained, the semblance of naturalness in antagonistic relations,
above all in bourgeois ones.

In reflections, which regarded
society as "the completed, essential unity of human beings with nature,
the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of human beings and
the realized humanism of nature" (Marx 1974, 1986), transitional stages
of that movement of thinking became evident. They paved the way for the idea
of the connection between the history of nature and the history of society,
for the concept that society is based upon nature, a concept which, in the later
stages of the same movement of thinking, was detached from the idea of the "true
resurrection of nature." In addition, the unity of materialist dialectics
with regard to nature, society, and knowledge, including the concretely historical,
primarily economic analysis of the particular law‑governed nature of society,
took the place of the union of naturalism and humanism. If, according to the
outcome of this movement of thinking, human beings with their activity remain
a part of nature, if, in this respect, their relationship to their own determination
by nature and to extra‑human nature is situated within the totality of
nature, still the relationship of social human beings to nature within the framework
of their special historicity, which is no longer determined by nature, is not
an internal relationship of nature.

The changes in this relationship
to nature form, nevertheless, an aspect of the historicity of the concept of
nature; the historicity of the relationship to nature mediates between objectively
real events of nature and knowledge of nature. The concept of the relationship
of social human beings to nature is linked, at the same time, to the concept
of the historicity of nature, although it is not derivable from the latter and
comprises, in a certain sense, the historicity of [end of p. 140] the
knowledge of nature. The three aspects of the historicity of nature branch out
united in a categorical correlation, which is positioned in the context of the
philosophical theory of dialectics.

4. "The
positivist search for 'the logic' of science was actually a search for an unchangeable
and enduring structure of the 'essence' of science" (Caton 1975. 655).
Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World, in which philosophy was
equated with the "pure formal statements" of logical syntax, permitted
neither the concept of nature nor the possibility of comprehended historicity.
[> main text]

5. It is a
consequence of Popper's falsificationism that "strictly speaking . . .
the history of a science [is] a rubbish heapPopper would want to express
it perhaps more reverently: a graveyard of rejected theories. . . . If we pursue
the matter further, we must recognize that a melancholy outlook on the future
corresponds to indifference toward the past. What, at the moment, is represented
so heroically as construction of a new system of hypotheses and theories is,
at bottom, nothing but a veritable labor of Sisyphus; for, with the next falsification,
everything, after all, will again collapse" Dosch (1982, 55). [>
main text]

6. It is traditional
in philosophy to use in English the capitalized term Being to denote
the philosophical category of being as distinct from being as a mere object.
"Dasein has been widely used in German philosophy to mean the 'existence'
(or Das‑sein,'that it is') as opposed to the 'essence'
(or Was‑sein, 'what it is') as a thing, state of affairs, person
or God. The word connotes especially the existence of living creatures. . .
. and most notably of human beings." (Krell 1976, 48n). [> main
text]

7. Heidegger
uses the term Ek‑sistenz to incorporate a quality of freedom in
regard to human existence.Ed. [> main text]

8. "If
every ground for each criterion in being has become [end of p. 141] ineffectual
and 'only' the abruptness of the clearing of Being, the uniqueness of an occurrence,
is, in that case there is history," Heidegger declares in
a manuscript from the late 1930s. "For this history, there is no reckoning
of time and no eternality of an In‑itself. Historynot because something,
because this and that, happens, but inasmuch as the 'that‑it‑is'
of the being of Being, and, before that, Being, is" (quoted in Pöggeler
1983, 158). [> main text]

9. "History
signifies here . . . the occurrence of a decision about the essence of truth"
(Heidegger 1981, 21). [> main text]

10. Otto
Pöggeler, a historian closely aligned with Heidegger and an interpreter
of his philosophy, states this concerning his late philosophy: "The occurrence
of something no longer means, now, a historical event but the fact that what
enters into its Being as its own, is united to it. In addition, destiny is no
longer understood primarily from history" (Pöggeler 1983, 166) [>
main text]

11. "The
processes of nature can be described as sequences of mere events, but those
of history cannot. They are not processes of mere events but processes of actions,
which have an inner side consisting of processes of thinking; and precisely
what the historian is looking for is these processes of thinking. All history
is the history of thought" (Collingwood 1980, 215) [> main
text]

12. If, in
distinction to the existentialist interpretation, nature is anthropomorphized
in a neoromantic fashion, human beings are looked upon as "those living
beings" "in whom nature articulates itself and becomes historical,"
and the concept of history is given a Heideggerian interpretation ‑in
this view, "history is not our history but that of nature in the human
species" (Meyer‑Abich 1982, 170)then life philosophy's dichotomy
between historicity and scientific concept of nature is not removed but, rather,
radicalized "in a historicity‑of‑being manner" ["seinsgeschichtlich"].
[> main text]

13. Boltzmann,
however, did not reshape the fundamental philosophical categories in order to
eliminate them. Neither consciousness of unsolved problems of physics and philosophy,
nor insight into the novelty of the statistical mechanics being formed at the
time, abolished the relevance of the category of conformity to law: according
to Boltzmann, "the conformity to law of events of nature is the fundamental
condition of all knowability" (Boltzmann 1905, 354). The idea, in the offing
here, of the historicity of physical [end of p. 142] knowledge rested
upon the materialist principle that "we must not intend to derive nature
from our concepts; rather, our concepts must conform to nature" (355).
[> main text]

14. "Quantum
theory is concerned with elementary particles and their transformations, and
that is, first of all, a problem of time. . . . Relativity theory was, to begin
with, a geometrical theory, and today it essentially has to do with the history
of the cosmos." ("There is no actual evolution, if everything is given"
(Prigogine 1982, 121ff)). [> main text]

15. "It
is one of the most fundamental and elementary experiences in physics that all
macroscopic bodies, especially the stars and apparently also the visible part
of the cosmos, have a history. This means, in the first place, that the state
of any macroscopic body changes irreversibly in time, so that its state depends
upon its whole history. Moreover, it means that there exists a well‑defined
direction of time in the cosmos from the past to the future" (Treder 1970,
253). [> main text]

16. Here,
Toulmin still unequivocally disapproved of the natural theology of the seventeenth
century, with its idea of a law‑giving God, an idea antithetical to the
historical point of view. Later, he pleaded for a return to the natural theology
of the seventeenth century (Toulmin 1982). [> main text]

17. This
is the case in C. F. von Weizsäcker's book The History of Nature,
where the bold approach of the idea of the historicity of nature was framed
with Heideggerian ideas and elements of the theological tradition. Prigogine
appears to keep separate his reflections on the historicity of nature from references,
first of all, to Heidegger, and then to Bergson and Whitehead. The discrepancy
between particular problems and the ideas of life philosophy alluded to at a
given time is also more noticeable insofar as, among other things, Prigogine's
breaking with Heidegger's philosophy hardly altered his own problematic and
the direction of his thought; in addition, they were not essentially shaped
by references to Heidegger. For Prigogine's views in a philosophical context,
see Zelený (1985). [> main text]

18. On this
subject, see, among others, Burrichter (1979). On current philosophical controversies
from a Marxist view point, see Buhr (1984). See, also, Kröber (1984). [>
main text]

19. On the
Marxist consideration of the present‑day problems of the socio‑historical
appropriation of nature, see, among others, Kim (1981), Buhr and Steigerwald
(1981, 79ff), Ökologie (1984), and Holz (1982, 155ff). [end
of p. 143] [> main text]